Here’s a prediction that has almost no chance of being wrong. Every major player in the trade book industry is about to develop a new obsession: how must our business model change when we reach a level of ebook sales that is dynamically disruptive to the print book ecosystem? This might not be exactly a […]
Holding back the ebook
The tactic of keeping the ebook off the market to “protect” hardcover sales, first executed by Sourcebooks this month on behalf of Bran Hambric, is becoming more widespread. At the same time that Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol was released simultaneously in cloth and digital, Ted Kennedy’s posthumous True Compass was released in print with the ebook withheld. […]
Is the ebook and POD combo a viable publishing strategy yet?
There’s a new publishing model afoot, which is to lead with the ebook and just print what you need. That might be POD, and it might be press runs, if you can sell out whole press runs. If the ebook becomes a substantial chunk of sales and if ebooks maintain their prices, this looks like […]
One brave publishing executive speaks out on ebook pricing, and we comment
When I did my two recent posts on ebook pricing — first one proposing “debut pricing” and then one taking it back as not viable — I got a note from a major company CEO saying that, of course, no publisher could discuss pricing with me because of anti-trust concerns. At the same time, I […]
What advice do you give a writer?
Because I am giving a keynote talk at the Writer’s Digest Conference in New York on September 18, I am thinking about “what do you tell a writer about digital change in publishing?” The view of the media world that I proselytize, which is that it is “going vertical”, is hard to accept if you […]